I never thought I would see the day my son asked me about photography, wanting to learn seriously. But it happened. Last weekend I found myself supplying him with my old camera body, a starter lens, camera bag and manuals. After reading for a while he asked, “What’s ISO?” and out comes my Digital Photography Basics eBook. Fun.

Sunday when my son suggested a drive to go take pictures, I couldn’t say no, could I? Not only for the photography, but I was dying to drive my just-purchased car a little bit. I wanted to see how my dog Zoey would do riding in the hatch back, since she was a good part of the reason I switched cars in the first place. Turns out regular hiking + exuberant dog + sedan with cloth seats = a giant mess of a car no one wants to ride in, no matter how hard I’ve tried to protect the back seat.

So off we went… Brandon, Zoey and I. With no real destination, we drove for a while, stopping for a break in the woods to let Zoey out a bit and to photograph. And what did we photograph? The new car, of course.

Brandon is obsessed with the show Top Gear lately, so he worked on getting some of the interesting camera angles they always use on the show. (The show has quite good photography, if you’ve never seen it.) I played around with capturing some abstracts of the forest reflections in the shiny red body. Carleidoscopes, I call them.

A sunny afternoon, a beautiful drive, a happy dog, sharing time and something I love with my son, and a few interesting photographs. Does it get any better? Why yes, it does. There was no dirty, panting dog at my shoulder, mucking up the back seat. Absolutely lovely!

The best known attraction in Glacier National Park — besides the glaciers — is Going to the Sun Road. This road is a scenic 50-mile drive on a highway first built in the 1920’s to connect one side of the park to the other.

It was built in difficult terrain for a different generation of vehicle (read: narrower) so it is not an easy road to navigate. Add in the traffic, the road construction to restore the road, and at times the weather, and it becomes a challenging drive.

It’s also challenging for photography. There are very few vehicle pull-outs, none at the upper part of the road going over Logan Pass (the highest point), so it’s catch-as-you-can for photographs. It’s a practice in quick composition: Photographing out the window of a moving vehicle, between trees and other obstructions to get a good view. I love this photo of my sister and I with our cameras pointing out the truck windows. It just captures it all – the scenery, the road, the photography experience.

Landscape photography isn’t typically my “thing” anyway, but it was fun to see what I could capture. Here are a few of my favorites from our various trips over the road. We traveled it 4 times during our week-long visit to Glacier, so I had ample opportunity to practice.

I like how this image shows the road, the traffic and the dropoff. It gives you a sense of the experience.

The light and shadow on the mountainside caught my eye here.

We even captured wildlife on the move. This was the only mountain goat we saw during our visit. He just happened to turn his head and look as we drove by.

Capturing another sort of “wildlife” — tourists — was fun too. I love the way they are all photographing different directions out of the top of the bus. The buses were pulled over and stopped, but we were moving on the road across the valley.

This is my absolute favorite of the bunch! Maybe not a classic “landscape,” but I love the shades of green and the layers of the hills created by the haze in the atmosphere.

Photographing out of a moving vehicle is not as hard as you might think. You want a fast shutter speed to reduce motion blur and it works best if you don’t have elements very near to the vehicle, as that’s where most of the blur will come from. You get a lot of “throw-away” shots but with practice you can get some good images. Give it a try sometime!

The USA is a young country. We’re babies in the timeline of countries throughout world history. We talk about having a “history,” but more often than not we are happy to bulldoze or junk our history to make way for the new. “Progress” we call. I used to feel the same way, until living abroad. It was in Europe I realized what we lose when we indiscriminantly move toward the future. If we don’t love and save our history, who will?

So I love it when pieces of our history, like these touring buses found in Glacier National Park, are restored.

Throughout Glacier National Park you’ll see these “Red Jammers” carrying tourists about.

Original built in the 1930’s, they were restored by Ford in the early 2000’s to continue to give visitors a classic experience. They now run on eco-friendly propane and are quieter than they once were.

They are a classic all the same. We didn’t take a tour on them, but I certainly loved photographing these beauties! Aren’t they pretty?

These images were all processed with my “Red Buddy” Lightroom preset, which I’ll share in my next newsletter. Be sure to sign up if you want to download the preset. And, in the name of progress, I’m upgrading to Lightroom 4 today. Yay! I look forward to playing around with this new revision. Have you upgraded yet? What’s your favorite new feature? Let me know!

Today I’m spelling it VW! After being a single-car family for the last nine months back in the US, for three years total if you include Italy, yesterday we bought a second vehicle, a used VW Passat. Today I’m feeling is a vast sense of relief.

It’s been harder than I expected to have one car in the US. It seemed so easy in Italy, but our lives were different there. It would be easier here if all I did was go to work and come home on a regular schedule. Or all my husband did was go to work and come home on a regular schedule. Or one of us was a completely stay at home parent. Or if no one in the family had any outside activities. Or if we did everything together. Or if all of our activities were accessible within walking distance. Or we lived in a big city with more frequent and extensive public transportation. Or we lived in a place where it was sunny all the time, where we could bike or scooter without getting wet. Or if we had all the time in the world to be flexible around transportation.

None of those things are true for us.

So lately it came down to either organizing and making tradeoffs based on transportation, or buying a second vehicle. Looking at everything, the answer was clear. It was time to get a car.

I worked so hard to make it work with one vehicle this long, I thought I would be disappointed. But I’m not disappointed in the slightest, only relieved. I’m surprised at how much relief I feel. I didn’t realize how much stress must have been building up inside me around the transportation situation. I’m happy we went this long, because I now know the tradeoffs I am and am not willing to make. I am confident that buying a second vehicle was the right decision for us, whereas nine months ago I was not convinced.

For those of you who live in the US and manage a family with one vehicle, I truly salute you! And you’ll find me happily waving to you with a smile on my face, from the ranks of the two-vehicle families again.

Cultural Reference Note: The question “How do you spell relief?” is from a 1970’s TV commercial for an antacid in the US. The answer was R-O-L-A-I-D-S. I wonder if equating this phrase with “relief” means I watched too much TV as a child…

There is a thrill of discovery that sometimes happens when you go out exploring. On our excursion last weekend (yes, the one with the grumpy pre-teen in the back seat), we happened past this awesome hot dog stand in the middle of nowhere.

“Stop! Turn around!” I exclaimed to my husband, “I need to photograph that.” I couldn’t resist the red, yellow and black and the vintage car. There were so many cool details in this little place! It’s too bad it wasn’t open, they serve Chicago-style hot dogs which are my husband’s favorite. We’ll just have to go back again! I’m sure there is another photograph or two to be captured.

I hope you have a chance to get out this weekend, maybe experience a little thrill of discovery of your own.

Every once in a while, you get to try something completely, totally new. While in Colorado, I had the opportunity to take photos of a band my brother is in, Cedar Avenue Blues Band or CABB for short. (My brother is the drummer, the tall one on the left, in the blue shirt.)

We didn’t have much time together, and I didn’t have time to scout a location, so I asked them to pick one. They worked it out with the Yellow Cab company to use their lot. We could wander around and take photos anywhere, but nothing would be moved for us. We met in the early evening, as the sun was lowering in the sky. It was hotter than heck and they were wearing these nice clothes.

Can we talk about uncomfortable? I’m usually not a people photographer. Now I had four adults I had to make simultaneously look good. I had a location with lots of distracting background, and light that was changing rapidly. Thank goodness, they were a great group to work with. As we moved around the lot, everyone made suggestions and worked together on ideas. The best idea of all was to have them pull out their instruments and play. Everyone relaxed and started having fun. You can see they are a band, and you can tell they have fun together. Don’t you want to hear them play now, after seeing this image?

What started out as really uncomfortable and nerve-wracking yielded something great. My skills with street scenes and varying light situations worked here as well, but I needed to use them quickly. It was worthwhile to get out of my comfort zone and experiment with a new situation and new subject. As I tell the participants of my Find Your Eye classes, each time you step outside of your comfort zone you expand it a little further. I doubt I’ll head in the direction of taking band promo shots on a regular basis, but at least I know I can get something useful. I’ve learned a little bit more, and my confidence has grown because of it.

In honor of our Process of Elimination exploration going on now, I’m going to share the straight out of camera shot too. When comparing with the image above you’ll note that I did some cropping and exposure adjustments in post processing. In this case, I was trying to get everything in the shot with a “clean” background, with room to adjust and crop later. I was taking a lot of shots as they sang, several frames per second, to get different expressions. It’s amazing how hard it is to get four people looking natural all at the same time!

I also played around with some post-processing, to see what they might like. Their favorite is the color boost. Mine’s the black and white. What’s yours?

Color boost

Black and White

You can hear the Cedar Avenue Blues Band here, or look for them playing around the Denver area. You’ll have a fun time!